


Forget Your Evil

by 221b_hound



Series: Star-crossed [14]
Category: Richard III - Shakespeare, Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Reincarnation, Shakespearean Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 14:34:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6380143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Sherlock complete a case in Leicester. The strain of it, and the location, bring their older selves, Khan and Richard, to the surface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget Your Evil

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AtlinMerrick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlinMerrick/gifts), [aranel_parmadil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aranel_parmadil/gifts).



> The title is from Winter's Tale, Act Five, Scene One:  
> "Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; With them forgive yourself."

The case in Leicester was difficult and the threat to the client, and to those who would assist her, great. Sherlock slept little and thus John also little slept, keeping a sturdy vigilance as though this were a battlefield.

And so it became, when the American gangster came to claim the bride who had fled and married another. Enemy fire became embedded in the walls, and one bullet into their client's beloved husband, Henry Cubitt. But John, with swift physick, held the poor man’s life inside his body, while Sherlock and the Lady Cubitt defeated the savage bandit.

(Indeed, the lady was so incensed she forgot her fear and instead expressed her rage with the hard toe of her riding boot into the bastard’s bollocks. John did not rush to the man’s aid, and found his painful sobbing a kind of music.)

Case resolved but sleepless yet, John and Sherlock walked the midnight streets of Leicester, weariness and recent danger thinning the walls between their waking and sleeping selves.

They came upon Leicester Cathedral, where Richard’s bones had been new-laid to rest, with all due pomp and circumstance. As they gazed upon it, the walls of the men-once-were and the men-now-are thinned and melted into the witching darkness.

Richard, once King, now content to be prince to no other than his most dear love, stood beside that guardian of his soul, his Khan. Khan, once god-like warrior, now content to be the subject and worshipper of his dearest Richard, stood nearby his timeless beloved.

They both looked upon the cathedral, and on evidence of kindly mourning lately held within, for a long-dead king.

That the people so reverently buried his rediscovered corpse had first roused in Richard contempt. Yet here still, people came to see his poor bent bones, and reckoned that five hundred and thirty  years of intervening history made his crimes less awful, or at least his brutish fate more cruel.

He truly did not know whether to feel scorn or confused humility, and so he felt both, which waxed and waned with his thoughts.

Khan walked close beside him into the Cathedral, it's high-sweeping stone a cold and lonely chamber to a heaven both had eschewed. They were not struck down, and so walked to the grave of Richard.

Richard stood tall as he might, and yet still stooped, this John’s body remembering the twists of Richard’s back.

‘I do not understand,’ Richard confessed.  ‘None has ever loved me, but thee. Neither mother nor father, nor brothers nor bride, nor soldiers nor subjects. I died reviled, and rightly so. And yet here…’

‘Here,’ said Khan, his arm pressed alongside his prince’s yet not moving to hold him, ‘Here perhaps through the centuries since, another truth has come to them. You, my love, are not the Richard whom I first knew, though Richard you are. Memories are not fast, and men love to weave new threads into old truths. But perhaps the truth of you, which has grown from those harsh days when we first loved, has fashioned new silk for the task. This sweet forgiveness and warm reverence they show you now, is perhaps not all for the self you were, but for the Richard you have become.’

‘Tis true, I am changed, for thee. I chose suffering so that I might make my heart worthy of thee, and to cleave to thee again, once I did find thee. I am Richard-made-new.’

‘You are, as I am new-made Khan, to be worthy of you, too,  and that we may be fated to abide, side to loving side, for all our lives to come.’

‘Yet I am not so different, am I, to what I was?’

Khan kissed Richard’s fingers. ‘Fierce yet, and strong yet, and yet loving, as you were with me. But with a gentler mien.’

‘Aye,’ Richard agreed, leaning against his love, ‘My soul had raging storms within, filled with despair and hatred, of none more than myself. My spirit is more temperate now, the tempests tamed to fairer seas by thy love.’

‘And this, I believe, is what this world now knows, without understanding how it knows it.’

Richard blinked. He blinked again. Khan bent to kiss the tear from his cheek.

‘You are my light and my heart, Richard.  The master of my own tempestuous soul-sea, who brought me rest.’

'And thee, my sovereign and starlit lord, who taught me love, and my better nature to be best.'

There in the church, by the grave of one who died a monster and was reburied a man – flawed, but a man withal, and redeemed – these two men, each saviour of the other, soft-kissed in the healing night.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was talking to Atlin about how much I miss writing these two. She sent me links to things about Richard's reinterment in Leciester Cathedral. Then I wrote this. Just a snippet, no big stories to come. But I do miss writing them.


End file.
